Profile
Prof Ianthi TSIMPLI
Co-Principal Investigator
Prof Ianthi Maria Tsimpli works on language development in the first and second language in children and adults, language impairment, attrition, bilingualism, language processing and the interaction between language, cognitive abilities and print exposure. Her doctorate thesis was published in 1996 in the series Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics, Garland with the title Functional Categories and Maturation: The Prefunctional Stage of Language Acquisition. She has extensively worked on the case of Christopher, a polyglot-savant, with Neil Smith (UCL) with whom she co-authored the book The Mind of a Savant: Language Learning and Modularity (1995, Blackwell) as well as a number of journal articles. A number of articles and book chapters co-authored with Neil Smith, Bencie Woll and Gary Morgan as well as the book "Signs of a Savant" (2010, CUP) have also been published on a subsequent research project investigating Christopher’s ability to learn British Sign Language.
Cambridge
Researchers
CLIC
Research Interest
Language
Literacy and cognition
First and Second Language Acquisition
Bilingualism
Language Disorders
Key Publications
Google Scholar Link
Tsimpli, I. M., & Dimitrakopoulou, M. (2007). The Interpretability Hypothesis: evidence from wh-interrogatives in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 23(2), 215-242. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658307076546
Tsimpli, I., Sorace, A., Heycock, C., & Filiaci, F. (2004). First language attrition and syntactic subjects: A study of Greek and Italian near-native speakers of English. International Journal of Bilingualism, 8(3), 257-277. https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069040080030601
Smith, N. V., & Tsimpli, I.-M. (1995). The mind of a savant: Language learning and modularity. Blackwell Publishing.